Gather ’round all you smartphone shutterbugs and take a trip back in time before pixels, before 35mm film. You who take it for granted that we can have photographs instantly, in any kind of light conditions and often at several frames per second — prepare to be humbled by the arduous, painstaking processes the pioneers of photography had to endure to make their images.

The photography exhibit at the Museum of Fine Arts, put together by senior curator Anne Havinga, highlights the work of these early adapters.

Shortly after the first photographs were made in France in 1839, using silvered copper plates (the -daguerreotype), artists and members of the leisure class quickly began to learn the craft, -using paper prints and glass plates. It was a laborious task, made all the harder since the images appeared upside-down and reversed in the ground glass viewer. Exposures lasted from several seconds to several hours. The developing process involved coating a sheet of paper with a salt solution, sensitizing it with silver nitrate and contact printing it in the sun.

Subjects in the 36-print show range from the expected still lifes and portraits to the unexpected such as Julien Vallou de Ville-- neuve’s “Re-clining Nude” from 1853 (which was deemed acceptable since it was made in the style of the classic painters)- and Auguste-Rosalie Bisson’s “The Crevasse, Savoie,” made in 1861, a landscape of climbers ascending Mont Blanc, the highest peak in the Alps. It was a remarkable achievement of early photojournalism, no doubt a daunting task to trek up the mountain-side lugging heavy camera equipment, braving avalanches and extreme temperatures.

His efforts resulted in a grand -total of three successful exposures.

One of the most haunting images is “The Apostle Preacher Jean Journet” (1857) by Gaspard-Felix Tournachon, known as Nadar. For a time, Nadar was the most celebrated portrait photographer in Paris. This contemporary-looking study of a street preacher, eyes gazing upward with great intensity, is striking for its dramatic lighting and -facial expression, unusual for its time.

Also on display is one of the museum’s recent acquisitions, a photo-graph of a young girl, “Xie Kitchin Asleep on Sofa” by “Alice in Wonderland” author Lewis Carroll, dating from 1873. He was an avid gentleman-photographer as well as an accomplished author who photographed this daughter of a friend dozens of times, as well as Alice Liddell, whom many assumed to be the model for the Alice in his celebrated work. In modern times his predilection for photographing young girls might be regarded with suspicion but in his age he was highly regarded for his portraits, in keeping with the Vic-torian view of children as innocents in the world.

The show is small in size but one can’t help being impressed by the quality of these early photographs, the ambitious scope of subject matter, the rich detail of the prints. No knock on digital photography — I couldn’t work without it — but I often wonder, how long will today’s photos last?